Archive: Author: Keri O'Shea

Possum (2018)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

Some films excel at that kind of grimy, disconcerting quality which Possum (2018) has in abundance. Every frame of this film makes your skin crawl: it’s a love letter to abandoned places and anonymous spaces, swept through with dead foliage and rot. This, in and of itself, makes the film fairly challenging viewing, even whilst you can appreciate the skill which went into arranging its sets and locations throughout. Add to this an arachnid puppet which seems to stand in for a grown man’s arrested development and mental trauma, and you have a fairly gruelling viewing experience. However, Possum doesn’t lend itself particularly readily to a coherent narrative – with the result that those not hypnotised by its interesting looks might find the whole experience as frustrating as it is unsettling.

The ‘blurb’ for the film tells us that Philip, the film’s chief protagonist (played with rare skill by Sean Harries) is returning to his dilapidated childhood home after some nameless disgrace has ended his career as a children’s entertainer, but – whether by nature of brutal editing, or out of a general sense of dispensing with straightforward plot development – no details whatsoever about this debacle are forthcoming, so that you would only really know this by reading about it. For all intents and purposes, we only see a middle-aged man carrying a holdall, on a journey of some kind. This is an obviously tortured guy, with not an albatross round his neck, but a terrifying tree-limbed spider marionette with a human face. I suppose if Philip was using this puppet to ‘entertain’ children, then it’s no wonder his career has come to an abrupt end, but there’s doubtless more to it than that.

Philip seems very invested in the puppet, which he calls ‘Possum’ (why?) but he also wants to get rid of it; its hold over him has obviously been of some duration, given that once back inside the squalid home where stepfather Maurice (Alun Armstrong) still lives, he is drawn towards picture books he seems to have had since childhood, which describe Possum in as terrifying a way as a certain similar book described a certain Babadook-dook-dook. Worse still, every time Philip tries to dispose of Possum, he ends up with it back in his life by mysterious means. Meanwhile, we are shown that he takes peculiar, unseemly interests in the goings-on around him, showing an odd fascination with a teenage boy he sees drawing on the train, perhaps seeing his scrawls as marking him out as a kindred spirit. We are also party to a very stilted resumption of Philip’s relationship with his stepfather, a man who seems perfectly at ease with the squalor which surrounds him, and who has little to say to his relative-by-marriage, other than laughing variously at his clear discomfort.

As the film progresses, Philip looks authentically more and more haunted by Possum, and seemingly more and more in need of getting things off his chest. It is certainly impressive to see how Harries manages to enact this increasing sense of oppression, as he almost disappears inside himself during the film’s progress. He also looks authentically ill, which is testament at least to the turmoil he’s feeling, even if he describes it very little indeed. In some respects Possum reminds me of the underappreciated Tony (2009), another film with a troubled, but unseemly male main character. As for Philip, his desperation to burn or to ditch the horrible puppet thing is, we see, useless; the more he seems to try to deal with this nightmarish situation, the more Possum appears, spider-limbed and vicious, in his dreams. Some of the sequences in Possum are genuinely unsettling, capturing something of those helpless childhood fears which so many of us seek in the horror cinema we watch as adults. Director/writer Matthew Holness clearly appreciates a good, creeping scare, and can bring a certain sense of a child’s powerlessness to the screen.

However, whilst you can feel genuine sympathy with such a tortured soul, there is very little in the way of closure here, just as there’s little concrete to get hold of throughout. My understanding of Philip’s issues with Maurice are essentially inferred, and not a little based on a kind of prejudice: I can’t, honestly, think of an interpretation for his trauma except for a certain kind of trauma, albeit one which is not exactly spelled out either. In fact, by the film’s close, I wasn’t sure whether I believed that most of the characters I’d watched were really present, so surreal and abstruse is the film as a whole. Overall, I feel that whatever else the film chooses to do or not to do, it badly needs a punchline. Not a neat tying-together of all loose ends, but something to avoid that final sense that little has taken place.

If you enjoy these kinds of exercises in atmospherics, then there is a great deal to love about Possum. Indeed, if you prefer cinema which is not forthcoming and leaves you with a series of sensations rather than telling a linear story, then it’s a triumph. However, this kind of approach is a risk, one which seemed to split the audience at Celluloid Screams, and one which I’d imagine will have a similar impact wherever Possum is seen and debated.

Possum screened at Celluloid Screams Film Festival 2018 and will be released in the UK on the 26th October 2018.

The Queen of Hollywood Blvd (2017)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

A noir-ish montage of images and a voiceover ruminating on the immorality of Hollywood introduces The Queen of Hollywood Blvd, a self-professed crime drama which promises to pitch a hard-bitten club owner against the tactics of a gang of organised criminals. On paper, the film does just this – but the style and tone involved are not what many would expect, and indeed anyone expecting a high-action piece of work would find themselves feeling all at sea after watching this movie. Your tolerance for this take on a crime story depends very much on your tolerance for slow-burn, almost art-house cinema generally.

Our protagonist, ‘Queen’ Mary (Rosemary Hochschild) – who looks at first to be channelling Kristin Scott Thomas in Only God Forgives with the gear she’s wearing – runs a strip club in Hollywood Boulevard’s shadow, and she’s spent twenty years building up the business. In fact, the club’s anniversary coincides with a landmark birthday for Mary; it’s her 60th, so she plans to throw a special party. Like the cop working one last shift before retiring, things invariably go awry. An old associate named Duke (Roger Guenveur Smith) rocks up, claiming that he’s come to collect on an old and clearly substantial debt. Why now, when criminal fraternities aren’t exactly known for shelving debts owed to them for decades? Well, it all adds to the drama I suppose. Mary is, in effect, told that the club no longer belongs to her. She is to hand over the keys to another associate later that night, and then make herself scarce.

Undeterred, she goes about her business, trying to enjoy her birthday with a bit of cake and a few casual lines of illicit substances. However, when it turns out that the crooks have got a hold of her grown-up son to make sure she toes the line, Mary is forced after all to deal with them. They want to strike a bargain, enlisting her help for a few nefarious schemes – although this doesn’t mean she gets to keep the club, rather that she gets to keep her boy. Cue a crisis of conscience to go alongside the more general crisis, as Mary tries to negotiate her way through this situation.

The Queen of Hollywood Blvd is a visually-arresting but, truth be told, in several respects a very frustrating viewing experience. Director and writer Orson Oblowitz is delivering his first feature length film here, and to give due credit he has a good eye for visuals, in particular editing together grand cityscapes with painterly club interiors, using the otherworldly neons to good effect (again, Only God Forgives springs to mind). He is also reaching for an emphasis on character, and it’s good to see an older woman in a lead role who hasn’t been sandblasted by a plastic surgeon, but actress Hochschild is kept so deadpan and introspective that it’s difficult to get a real sense of her internal life and motivations, which are utterly key to driving the narrative onward. Her own lines are somewhat flat and peppered with platitudes, too, which also works against what could have been.

In other scenes, the script aims to be more naturalistic, and even adds in odd glimpses of humour reminiscent of Tarantino’s asides (though not attaining that; say what you like about Tarantino, but he’s superb at capturing something of the inanity and charm of everyday conversation). Also akin to Tarantino there’s heavy use of music, but perhaps most similarly of all we get yellow on-screen text to announce each new ‘act’ of the film, so Kill Bill can and does keep on intruding into your appreciation of this film.

I also found that some minor issues caught my eye; some continuity issues are in there, but then a bigger issue is that the film’s position in time was unclear. I found myself wondering why, say, one of the crooks had a framed picture of Reagan on the wall and VCRs figure in the plot, but then the streets are full of modern vehicles and the girls at the club have very modern-style tattoos. It could be that the film has opted quite deliberately to belong to that timeless, rootless type of setting which focuses fashionably on the lo-fi and doesn’t want us to know when these events are taking place, but I always find this distracting personally, an attempt to ignore time which makes me wonder about nothing else. (It Follows, I’m looking in your direction here.) But all of these things would be minor, were it not for the fact that The Queen of Hollywood Blvd is, I am afraid to say, quite so slow and ponderous as it is. Its deliberate pace and minimal action means that very little happens within the first hour; unless the atmosphere is note-perfect and engrossing, then this can be alienating. It even risks an audience’s engagement completely, something which worked against it in my case.

The Queen of Hollywood Blvd could quite possibly engage patient viewers with a penchant for brooding, minimalistic spins on crime drama, those for whom mood conquers everything. It’s also an artistic film. Perhaps the fact that it so clearly nods to other filmmakers who have achieved the very things it seems to have been influenced by works against it, emphasising its flaws rather than its strong points.

The Queen of Hollywood Blvd receives an On Demand release on October 16th 2018. 

 

 

30 Years of Men Behind the Sun

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

Editor’s note: this discussion of Men Behind the Sun contains spoilers.

The Chinese film Men Behind the Sun (1988) is not altogether well known in the West, and has yet to enjoy the kind of lavish DVD or indeed Blu-Ray release which has usually happened for even the most censor-baiting movies by thirty years after their creation. Those who have not seen the film itself, but know a little about it, will probably know about its notorious reputation for gore, perhaps for several key scenes in particular; before I ever got hold of a copy, I knew about ‘the autopsy scene’ and ‘the frostbite scene’ from hushed discussions in magazines and fanzines, for example, and I’m willing to bet many readers here will have heard similar things. These scenes are still, undeniably, important and shocking in the extreme (and more so, when you learn a little about how they were done) but I think it’s a real disservice to the work of director Tun Fei Mou if his film is known only for these. These scenes, and others like them, should never exist in isolation in our imaginations – as merely grisly little tableaux to be relished by gorehounds. Men Behind the Sun is a phenomenal film, in which even the most seemingly outlandish scenes have their basis in historical fact, and however appalling the scenes are to watch, they’re of vital importance to the narrative of the film as a whole. In essence, the entire film is a scream of agony by the Chinese about their WWII treatment at the hands of the Japanese; its rage is measured and doled out in a well-constructed, engrossing story. I will acknowledge that it’s difficult to watch. But I feel that anyone with even a passing interest in the history of the Far East should see it, and should be upset by it. These things should upset us, and should be acknowledged.

As the film explains in its opening scenes, aggressive Japanese empire-building in the early decades of the twentieth century had seen it conquer wide swathes of the Far East, including Korea and parts of China. Expansionist ideals were by no means and have never been the exclusive tenure of the West, and so the Japanese occupied parts of countries which they considered to be populated by people decidedly less cultured than themselves. Throughout the decade, closer and closer relations with Nazi Germany – though often problematic – saw the Japanese essentially following a similar path of conflict, taking territory whilst prevaricating in its attitudes and alliances with the global powers by now in play. They also committed themselves to a small-scale, but no less brutal nor important programme of medical experimentation, targeted towards boosting their war efforts, but as with the experiments eventually undertaken by the Nazis in Europe, also overlaid with the pure cruelty of curiosity, when that curiosity finds subjects deemed less than human.

The district of Manchuria (North-East China) was under complete Japanese control after 1931. It was in this region that the Japanese established Unit 731, their flagship biological and chemical warfare research facility. At the end of the war, the Japanese did a remarkable and meticulous job of covering their tracks, destroying many records of what had taken place, but enough has survived to reveal a sadistic programme of experiments performed upon mainly the Han Chinese, though also on Soviets, Allies, Mongolians and Koreans. Men Behind the Sun is a film about Unit 731, and the young (almost child) Japanese soldiers forced to help oversee operations. In order to equip them to do their new jobs, the camp’s military and medical hierarchy has to essentially break down their humanity. The boys can no longer see the local Chinese as simply people, but as ‘marut’ – literally ‘logs’, but a word which I believe translates best as ‘guinea pigs’, simply fodder for experimentation. They try to be obedient, as any good Japanese soldier would; they prevaricate, however, when the cruelty of their masters impinges upon their lives in the most brutal way, when a local child who has been their friend is taken, killed and his organs harvested. He’s taken so quietly, because the boys themselves are told to bring him, and he trusts them. Their sense of betrayal is authentically upsetting to watch and phenomenally acted by the young cast.

To make this scene (one amongst many) even more skin-crawling, rumours that this scene contains a real autopsy turns out to be quite true. When a local child died in an accident, Tun Fei Mou somehow prevailed upon the doctors performing the child’s post-mortem to allow him to use footage: the deceased was about the same height and weight as the child actor for the scene, so it has that unsettling note of veritas. The doctors (incredibly) accommodated his request, even dressing in Japanese uniform to complete the procedure. The organs we see being removed are, so we’re told, pig organs rather than human, though it seems an odd concession to modesty when we’ve just seen a real child’s corpse being cut into. Likewise, the notorious ‘rats can overpower a cat’ scene where a cat is apparently mauled to death by rats is now being denied as real by the director, though it looks very, very much like an animal genuinely dies here. This sort of thing could of course never, ever happen today, and it’s bizarre that it ever did, but even if we can’t quite accept it, we can perhaps explain it by the fact that at this time, there was no SFX industry in China, and Tun Fei Mou felt it was of the utmost importance to show the experiments as they really were. He couldn’t have found anyone to make rubber models for key scenes, and even if he could, perhaps this would have gravely affected the film he was trying to make.

Real body parts are used for all of the film’s most horrific scenes. This includes the infamous scene I alluded to above, where a marut Chinese woman (fresh from having her surplus-to-requirements newborn smothered to death in the snow) is given slow, prolonged frostbite by having her arms extended through a hole in an outside wall into the freezing winter conditions. When her arms are completely dead, she first has her arms thawed in warm water, and then Dr. demonstrates how you can then skin the flesh from the bones; it flays off easily. The actress playing this part – Mou’s niece – held a real corpse’s arms out into the subzero temperatures in order to freeze them, nearly getting frostbite herself, and then holds onto them for the main scene. The overall effect is utterly repellent and – as revealed in a 1995 New York Times article, whose author was made privy to Japanese testimony – it really happened to people. Limbs were really frozen and flayed. Limbs were bludgeoned, to see if any feeling remained. The overall feeling I get from this scene, apart from obviously flinching, is the director’s real sense of anger that this ever happened to Chinese people. We’re forced to look at this in as exact a replica of the events in question as it is feasible to give, and the impact is immense. Of course, viewers are welcome to look at it simply as a gory scene and thousands no doubt have, but I think it’s missing the point.

I won’t simply talk through every scene in this horrific history lesson, but I will say I feel none of them are chosen simply by chance, or to shock for their own sakes. The effect of the film is to steadily, unhesitatingly paint a picture of a unique point in history, with content always rooted firmly in that history, and underpinned by character studies which give the film its strongest juxtapositions. The sadistic personality of Shiro Ishii, for example, is a man devoted to Japan, whose big break in the progress of biological warfare comes from a laugh he has after a trip to a brothel. You can spread bubonic plague, he realises, by distributing infected fleas in porcelain bombs. And of course, this is also true. It’s worth bearing in mind that this man was given immunity by the Americans after the war, and continued to work, turning up at front-line institutions to wield his expertise. In fact, after offering us another gruelling juxtaposition (the Japanese woman who gives birth as the camp burns, giving us one last glimpse of life opposing death) it is revealed to us that Shiro’s Eureka moment led to a real outbreak of bubonic plague in Manchuria. Plague, which was at one time scheduled for use against California, had Japan not surrendered after America unleashed  atomic bombs upon them…

“Friendship is friendship; history is history.”

When Men Behind the Sun was first made, it offered, interestingly, something of an issue for the modern China which had produced it: China was, by this point, keen to keep a good working and economic relationship with Japan, now a neighbour with whom it had long enjoyed peace. This neatly underlines how much the world had changed by this point, with young Chinese and Japanese people being gripped by so little of the negativity which would have been hugely significant to even their nearest ancestors. It is right and good that the sins of the fathers should not spill over into modern China or Japan; an ever-dwindling number of people even survive who could have been implicated in any of these events, and no one benefits when new generations are made to labour under whatever modern version of original sin we now think is befitting.

However, nor should we shy away from unpalatable truths. Where many historical films can be taken to task for tinkering with history, rendering it more tolerable or even misrepresenting recorded facts in order to offer a different version of events, Men Behind the Sun is rather different fare, and audiences were unsurprisingly shocked by it all, with Japanese audiences in particular finding it hard to bear. Several sequels followed, each in turn examining more unpalatable histories, though never quite as shockingly as Men Behind the Sun did. This film does everything it can to tell its story, taking every opportunity to show us what is strongly believes in, with no need to embellish, and a wholesale rejection of glossing over anything. This it does by shocking means, and by using methods which would today be illegal. This means that Men Behind the Sun has more of a reputation as an exploitation movie, an understandable but, to my mind misleading state of affairs which threatens to dismiss a unique film about a little-known period of time. It’s a period in time, it’s worth remembering, which was very nearly kept secret forever. Had the Japanese officials at Unit 731 been any more thorough in its cover-up, no one would ever have known what befell tens of thousands of people who ended up there.

I can end this feature with nothing further other than to reiterate my belief in the film’s essential worth, and to point again to the quote which runs over the film’s opening credits (quoted above) – words which sum up the weight of the past, without succumbing entirely to it. The world into which Men Behind the Sun was released was indeed benefiting from friendship with the old adversary, but nothing can ever take away what had happened, and a film of this calibre and nature ensures that we learn from the bloody lessons of history. It’s a fitting and a sobering legacy.

Strange Nature (2018)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

There have been many horror films about environmental havoc over the years, but it seems as though frogs have not figured prominently in these. Aside from the game-changing (or even life-changing) Hell Comes to Frogtown and a short cameo in Baskin, frogs have been largely overlooked, so I’ll admit: the press information for Strange Nature won me over via its apparent novelty, speaking of mutant frogs and the like. It’s possibly strange that we’ve seen so few amphibians in horror cinema; frogs have to live with us, have to cope with whatever we flush into the water, and their habitat has an immediate effect on them. This brings us to rural Minnesota, where the story begins.

We’re introduced to some of our key characters, mother Kim (Lisa Sheridan) and sulky pre-teen son Brody (Jonah Beres). Mother and son are heading to Tuluth, Minnesota to look after her ailing father Chuck (Bruce Bohne), and son is sulky because he doesn’t much fancy living somewhere which has no indoor toilet, let alone Wi-Fi. Conditions at their new home are therefore understandably basic, though the surrounding farmland is beautiful, and attractive to wildlife photographers. Such as Lisa (Tiffany Shepis) who soon encounters what sounds like a large, disgruntled critter (which, sadly, we never see). Brady and Kim soon find that lots of the frogs in the area are oddly mutated, with additional limbs, and they begin to ask why – at around the same time as people begin to go missing. Thus the scene is set for nature to give these folks a kicking, with Kim now in a new starring role as environmental investigator.

The film at this juncture could have gone, to my mind, in one of two ways. Either it could have gone all out with glorious excess, using its environmental theme as an excuse to hurl froggy gore at the screen, or else elected to look quite seriously at the topic of pollution and its aftermath. Perhaps surprisingly, at least to my mind, the film largely opts for the latter. This is a very script-heavy film with a lot of dialogue employed to develop character and motivation, though thanks to this it feels a little slow in the middle act, and after Tiffany Shepis departs proceedings very early (she’s criminally underused here, and generally deserves more appreciation for sheer work ethic alone) it feels as though we’ve just been tantalised with the promise of some huge aggressive monster-creature. Instead, Kim is all about exorcising her demons as a former pop singer who made the mistake of insulting the denizens of Tuluth before heading off to a better life, and so she ends up working with the local elementary school science teacher to understand the situation and hopefully alert the locals to what’s happening before it’s Too Late.

Gradually, Strange Nature becomes less about frogs and more about general mutation issues, as the pollution problem seems to be affecting people too. Plot-wise, there’s a hint at something a little like schistosomiasis, but I was largely put in mind of The Bay, with whatever’s in the water now extending its reach to the human population. The tone stays serious throughout, though the film does save some practical effects for the final act. There are ideas here, and some of the special effects scenes are quite imaginative, but it doesn’t quite feel like a pay-off. Also, does every indie filmmaker use the same audio library? There’s a baby crying in this film which feels like the most familiar baby’s cry in the world, having been used on Tool’s album Aenima and, it seems, in every low-budget film since. That ‘baby’ could be a parent themselves by now.

Everyone is very much in earnest in Strange Nature, and the film quite fairly endeavours to make serious points about our impact upon the natural world, perhaps wisely realising that a full-on approach with everything alluded to appearing on screen would be costly and difficult to achieve. The emphasis is very much on the people affected by this story accordingly, and I suppose you do in the end feel that the key characters have been on the proverbial ‘journey’, so in that respect Strange Nature does what it sets out to do. This doesn’t grant us a high-action film, however, and it does feel as though the film lacks some punching power, holding back its horror elements until the bitter end, which is a little frustrating. Still, the film does have noble aims, even if it ultimately gets there by less than perfect means. This is after all James Ojala’s first feature-length offering, and after honing his skills in a number of different roles in filmmaking, I’m sure there’s lots more to come from him yet.

 

Night of the Creeps (1986)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

You have to hand it to director and writer Fred Dekker. Not only has he made some of the most straightforwardly entertaining films of the past forty years or so, but those films are – for many people – forever wedded to the 1980s, so forming part of people’s nostalgia for a decade when many of them were growing up and experiencing cinema for the first time. Even for those who didn’t see his films within the decade they were made (I never saw the film under discussion here until I was well into adulthood) the effect and the charm seems the same. Dekker might not have set out to set down the 80s for future audiences, but he captures something about them perfectly nonetheless, even when he was imagining a dystopian future, or a time in the past. Although his directorial work is sadly minimal, he has also worked on a number of seminal movies in the capacity of a writer, and he has a very distinguished style which is recognisable to this day. Night of the Creeps, which he did direct as well as write and which is about to receive a brand new Eureka! release, is a firm favourite with genre fans for good reason. It’s funny, it’s innovative and it’s immensely ambitious.

Night of the Creeps starts in the 1950s, when an alien skirmish taking place in the skies above Earth results in a mysterious capsule being jettisoned from the craft. It falls to Earth, where it soon threatens to interrupt the romantic pursuits of a group of white-bread young college students, two of whom see it land (and, being idiots, simply have to go and investigate). Oh, there’s a crazed axe murderer on the loose on the same evening; it never rains but it pours. After we see the worst happen with respect to both of these events, we cut to 1986. The weird, weird world of US college life is getting into full swing for that academic year, including the traditions of potential fraternity and sorority house inmates undertaking dangerous/stupid things as ‘pledges’ (seriously, America: why do you do it to yourselves?) Two outsiders, ‘dorks’ Chris (Jason Lively) and best friend J. C. (Steve Marshall) are doing their best to navigate through this new, potentially fraught social situation, as well as hankering after beautiful, probably inaccessible girls like Cynthia Cronenberg (Jill Whitlow). Sadly for them, it turns out that to get anywhere either socially or romantically, they’ll have to actually sign up for a pledge of their own – as set by a group of probable future Republican party candidates, who make it good and difficult. Their task? To break out a cryogenically frozen corpse from the local hospital.

As you might have guessed, this is no regular corpse. Nope – this guy has been preserved since that fateful night in the 50s when the guy in question, Johnny, fell foul of whatever the hell was in that capsule. As soon as Chris and J.C. open his pod, he seems to revive: obviously he’s been preserved as the authorities try to figure out what the hell happened to him, but the reanimated Johnny wanders out into the night, terrifies a few people – Chris and J.C. included – and then his head splits open, releasing a number of what can only be described as space slugs. Uh-oh. These odd goings-on soon demand the attention of the police, headed by the grizzled Detective Cameron (Tom Atkins), whom it later turns out has some personal issues tied up with this town. Whether this will help him or hinder him remains to be seen, but certainly hell is breaking loose: the space slugs are seeking new hosts, and when they find them, they zombify them.

“If you take it seriously, you just get depressed all the time, like you! Fuck you!”

Fred Dekker set out to cram as many B-movie cliches as he could into this film, and I’d say he was pretty successful at that: the film is very busy, moving at pace through a series of cinematic ideas both familiar and strange. The concept of aliens endangering the Earth was very well established, even a little old hat by this stage, but audiences would definitely have recognised the idea of something coming from beyond the stars which could render people mindless and dangerous. It’s just the mechanics of that process were, shall we say, different in ’86. Science fiction had shown people alien parasites, but never quite like this, and one of the strangest legacies of Night of the Creeps is that it kickstarted a minor space slug subgenre which culminated twenty years later with Slither (2006); the director of that film, James Gunn, reckoned he’s never seen Night of the Creeps, but if that’s true then it’s a bloody outlandish coincidence, as much as Slither’s a great film in its own right. The space slugs aren’t the be all and end all, though: this film is an unashamed love letter to horror and sci-fi in lots of different styles. In Night of the Creeps you can also see echoes of zombie horror, a couple of nods to Re-Animator (or at least I’d argue so; the cat and the dog in the film could easily have wandered out of Dr. West’s lab) and even a tip of the hat to the slasher subgenre, with our escaped lunatic with an axe cropping up not once but twice. This is also a very gory film in places, as you’d expect where parasites explode out of people’s heads and only shotguns or flames seem to knock the unwitting hosts back. I’m glad Dekker didn’t shoot the entire film in black and white as originally planned; we’d have lost a lot of the ‘ick’ factor, which is integral to the entertainment in a film which refuses to take itself seriously. And all of this in less than ninety minutes, which only makes me hanker for the days when filmmakers could routinely tell a story so economically.

Night of the Creeps also boasts what I think we can now call a classic Dekker script, somewhere between plausible and humane in places, obviously crafted in others, with catchphrases and black humour throughout. It’s a film where you can laugh at the exchanges between Chris and J.C, but also get a true sense of their friendship, right down to a genuine feeling of pity when they’re torn apart. Tom Atkins, one of the most recognisable and beloved figures in cult cinema, is at his best here (in what he’s termed his own favourite film which he appeared in). He’s such a vivid character, but again, when not camping it up and yelling “Thrill me!” down the telephone, the guy can really act. I think that’s it: up against these preposterous turns of events, all of the cast do such a great job, and lend a kind of deserved gravitas to their roles. Their respect for the subject matter makes the storytelling all the more entertaining. Sure, the end of the film (with this ending) tantalises for a sequel which never came, but Night of the Creeps is more than sufficient. As pure entertainment, I can’t fault it.

This upcoming release looks superb too, with a crisp cut and a great audio track. There are also some interesting extra features (more Tom Atkins can never be a bad thing) and, all in all, if you don’t yet have this film in your collection, this Blu-ray release is happily recommended.

Night of the Creeps will be released by Eureka! Entertainment on 8th October 2018.

 

Five Fingers for Marseilles (2017)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

The Western, pioneered by the likes of Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah, is a format which has spawned cinema around the world, with recognisably Western-style filmmaking appearing everywhere, even in the likes of the Convict Scorpion films in Japan during the 70s. However, I think it’s probably fair to say that South Africa isn’t greatly known for Westerns. Given the Western’s emphasis on lawlessness and vigilante justice, though, it’s clear why director Michael Matthews decided to give it a whirl in this setting. That this is his first feature is incredible; the resulting film, Five Fingers for Marseilles, eight years in the making, is a skilled piece of work, if a challenging, weighty experience.

A voiceover explains to us, at the outset, that when the railways came to South Africa, bringing foreigners, a brand-new settlement named Marseilles displaced the native population to a township called Railway, which was permitted to linger only for as long as Marseilles thrived. As a spirit of insurrection at this unfairness begins to pervade the town, particularly the town’s youngsters, a group of five friends begin to consider themselves in an almost mythical way as future folk heroes, weaving themselves into stories about their land and its defence. However, when two corrupt Afrikaner police show up to extort money from the inhabitants of Railway, what at first seems a childish conceit on turns into something far more serious. One of the boys, Tau, commits murder out of one of those classic, tragic misunderstandings where it seems this is the only honourable thing to do.

We are not privy to the immediate aftermath of this situation, but we do know that the ‘lion of Marseilles’, Tau, as an adult, has suffered in the intervening years. He is about to be released from jail, and he has nowhere to go but back to Marseilles and Railway, its inferior satellite town on the hill. But no one knows him anymore; he sees what has become of his old childhood gang, now variously oppressed by new, exciting outsiders in the wake of post-apartheid, and he’s galled to see that the corruption which dogged the town has simply passed hands to the native population, as gangs and bent police each control their share of the streets. As he comes to terms with the butterfly effect which his childhood actions have had on his friends in their adult years, his chief struggle is with himself: is a hero? Can he be? And if so, what are his responsibilities?

All of this is convincingly, and very movingly carried on the shoulders of the lead actor Vuyo Dabula as Tau, a man who displays a staggering gamut of emotions whilst barely saying a word; he oscillates between rare moments of joy and desperation, and it’s a very absorbing performance throughout. But he is ably supported by his old friends, in particular Zeto Dlomo as the gang’s old sweetheart Lerato, now a grown woman desperate for life to improve for her and her ailing father. A devastating musical score pulls on the heartstrings even more, with its long, low incidental notes underscoring the tragedy unfolding on-screen. I do feel that the film plays out as a tragedy in many respects, because for all of the nods to the great Westerns of the past, there’s an overarching dour atmosphere here of impending doom, right from the start, where any expectations we might have for a gang of children on our screens are ultimately taken in a different direction; I don’t think you ever feel that people are going to ride off happily into the sunset. The film looks spectacular, an engaging visual blend of landscape and townscape, myth and reality – with certain characters, such as the ominous gang leader, seeming almost supernatural in some scenes. Commentary on the presence of ‘the land’ as the ultimate arbiter of man’s affairs even leans towards folklore, albeit ultimately played out in gritty, hard-hitting and realist fashion. It’s also interesting to get a film which plays out in a variety of different languages: English is a lingua franca, but the characters code-switch throughout, using Sotho and Xhosa in turn, too. This helps to ground the action in its setting, as well as bringing native languages to the fore, as spoken by the people who live in these areas.

Five Fingers for Marseilles is in no respects an easy or a comfortable watch. It is selective about showing us violence, but it successfully engineers the sensation that hell is about to break loose at any point, whilst making us care about the lives which are at stake in this corner of the world. In this respect is it a slow, solemn and affecting experience, meticulously put together and acted throughout. This is a solemn, very sombre film which rewards the attention it inevitably demands. Whilst not a film you would pop back on for a re-watch at any point soon after an initial watch, it is nonetheless recommended for anyone seeking careful exposition and atmosphere from a bleak human drama. But be warned: this brooding film packs a punch.

Five Fingers for Marseilles will be appearing in cinemas this September.

 

Martyrs for a Decade

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

Spoiler warning.

It certainly doesn’t feel like ten years has passed since Pascal Laugier’s divisive horror film Martyrs first arrived, but the more I reflect on the state of horror cinema at the time of its release, the more I feel inclined to agree that ‘the past is a foreign country’. In 2008, horror cinema was still riding high on an often grisly wave of excruciating cruelty. The ‘new wave’ of European horror cinema, alongside US box office dare-fests like the Saw franchise and Hostel, seemed determined to goad audiences by forcing them to be privy to all manner of methodical torments. Not for nothing had the term ‘torture porn’ arisen, albeit not because these films were meant to be titillating, but rather for the camera’s unblinking gaze as it watched these torments occur – often to a prone body literally manacled into position to allow us to get a good, long look, leading to growing frustrations (on this author’s part, at least) with the new tradition of torture-via-chair, albeit that in 2008 this trope was rather newer. It’s also telling that our website’s original incarnation was under the title Brutal as Hell, which says a good deal more about the cinema we covered then than it did when we finally retired the name in favour of the rather broader church of Warped Perspective.

Certainly, I never expected to find myself writing about Martyrs again. My initial, gut reaction to the film was very negative indeed: I saw it as cut-and-shut torture porn with pretensions, a glorified excuse to beat and maim women by adding a glib reference to the meaning of life at the end. However, it’s a film I’ve gone on to watch several times, when I haven’t done that even with films I’ve lauded with praise from the beginning, and on each repeat viewing, I’ve noticed something new, something intriguing. Even if I think a damning indictment of the film can still stand, and even if I can still empathise with that, by ten years on I’ve come to think there’s more to Martyrs – largely because, upon reflection, I think it occupies an interesting space in the development of 21st Century horror.

I reference the ‘cut-and-shut’ idea above because one criticism of Martyrs is how it shifts from the intimation of supernatural horror to something altogether different in its second act, as the film’s supernatural content gets closed off not just to the audience, but also to the people trying to coax supernatural evidence out of their victim. Lucie’s campaign of vengeance (abuse-revenge rather than rape-revenge) is punctuated by visions of a tortured girl rendered almost demonic by her determination to attack Lucie. We are left wondering, at this stage at least, whether Lucie is undergoing a pure hallucination: the gravity of the attacks on her push the idea of this being ‘all in her head’ about as far as they could conceivably go. In this respect, Martyrs seems to draw together a lot of the quite disparate threads which were drifting along together in horror cinema at the time, and it does so in a way which is quite unique and challenging.

Whilst ordeal horror was in the ascendant during this period, supernatural horror hadn’t gone away – but, with notable exceptions like The Orphanage, it was definitely undergoing something of a lull, perhaps doing best in the blink-and-miss-it terrors of Paranormal Activity, a supernatural horror which hardly bothers with supernatural horror. As found footage hit its stride, many filmmakers tried to invoke supernatural terrors – quite possibly simply out of a desire to find something new to film through a handheld camera –  but refracted through a wheeling camera and often dreadful production, it rarely worked well after the initial surprise hit of Blair Witch. In many ways, then, supernatural horror was underused and underappreciated in the first decade of the new century, with many film fans having to look back, or look East, to find compelling supernatural horror. Martyrs dabbles with the supernatural in a unique way: it raises the spectre, modernises it, places it front and centre and then performs an about-face, revealing that all of the imagined bogeymen are real, Lucie’s hallucination is a manifestation of her own metaphorical demons, and that via what happens to Anna maybe – maybe – there is nothing out there beyond that. In so doing, it effectively combines different styles of horror, placing the psychological squarely into the physical and the visceral.

This cumulative approach now looks and feels like the moment the wave broke, when ordeal horror finally reached its zenith and, post-Martyrs, had nowhere truly compelling left to go. After Pascal Laugier skinned a woman to interrogate whether there was an existence of ours beyond us, further excursions into ordeal horror felt ever more flat and needless, even a bit desperate. I do believe Martyrs was widely-enough seen and appreciated – at least by horror fans – to have significantly contributed to this, though of course directors were always going to run out of ways to maim eventually, or at least, audiences were going to grow jaded about them. Perhaps fittingly then, if not happily, Martyrs seems to have hung heavily over Laugier’s career, with his subsequent offering The Tall Man going to ground very quietly – and his most recent release, Incident in a Ghostland, only very slowly garnering interest. The film that made his name continues to define him as a filmmaker, and there’s been no easy way around that; any momentum Martyrs could or should have offered was instead met with open-mouthed, uncomfortable silence – which is perhaps inevitable, given the horrendous, protracted violence and dismal conclusions it provided us.

Similarly, the world we continue to occupy is all too ready to grant us protracted violence and dismal conclusions, with our own spectres ready to rise up and greet us. Dig just a little, and you can find footage of human beings still being burned alive or executed for some thinly hopeful spiritual reason or transgression; if Martyrs’ most appalling scenes once seemed too extreme or absurd, then do they now, under a continued torrent of evidence which we have to work to avoid, rather than seek out? Any internet search does it. And, as our population ages (it’s notable that so many of the seekers in Martyrs are elderly) we are going to be brought up against the all-but-certain nothingness at the end of it all. As for networks of people tormenting and abusing children – well, it’s notable that the word ‘historic’ has now undergone a kind of pejoration, so often have we heard it in its new guise; it’s now often wedded to cases of organised child abuse going back decades, happening just beneath the surface of the everyday. In effect, life can be wonderful, but for so many it can be a bleak and thankless existence, and the film encapsulates perfectly that compulsion to find purpose, by whatever horrible means. I don’t mean to be trite here: Martyrs is, after all, just a film, but perhaps it has taken root because of the way it cast about for unpalatable elements in the real world and condensed them into a startling and – whatever your take on it – unforgettable horror movie.

This, perhaps, is a fitting place to end the discussion on Martyrs, and almost certainly – this time – the last thing I’ll feel the need to write about this film. But as we mark a decade since the film was released, and I suggest that Martyrs was the last true ordeal of the ordeal horror wave, it begs the question: if genuine horrors continue to encircle us as ordeal horror recedes, what’s next? Whilst many, brilliant horror films have been released in the years since Martyrs made such a stir, it’s not easy to say at the moment of writing whether any definite trends are emerging, at least not in the ways common to the new wave of European horror under discussion here. However, horror cinema has always found ways to symbolise and exaggerate our real life anxieties, birthing new genres or bringing old genres to new prominence. So, as many of the things brought to the screen in Martyrs keep us doubting a decade later, and as new real-life terrors inevitably come along, it will be fascinating to see how horror morphs and grows to reflect them. Films at their best – and worst – continue to have tremendous power, and Martyrs is absolutely a film which encapsulates this.

A Terrifying Tale of Sluts and Bolts! Frankenhooker (1990)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

You know a film still has something, however many years pass, when you consider what would happen to it if it was pitched today. So at a guess, and alongside most of the best horror and exploitation films ever made, a film which involves exploding drug addicts and reanimated hookers via bad science would be unlikely to get a pass – at least, not from anyone with a considerable budget or say-so. This is the very basic plot of Frankenhooker (1990), a film which feels like it nicely rounds off Frank Henenlotter’s period of film releases during the 1980s, albeit that Basket Case 3 was still to follow in 1991. I remember seeing the posters and the video box art for Frankenhooker as a kid, though it was a few years before I got to find out what it was all about. In fact, I’m sure I saw this before I ever saw the ‘classic’ Frankenstein movies made by the likes of Universal or Hammer, so it was a matter of some surprise to me that Boris Karloff didn’t ask the angry locals with pitchforks if they ‘wanted a date’.

Although released in 1990, it’s the 80s spirit of enterprise and a ‘can do’ attitude which leads certain leading men to have a go at science, even though they’ve been outright rejected by the scientific or medical establishments. What cares Herbert West that he’s been shunned? He’s going to uncover the secret of life anyway, and then they’ll all be sorry. Likewise, Frankenhooker’s young protagonist Jeffrey Franken (James Lorinz) hasn’t been dissuaded from trying to master the greatest secrets of human life by the mere fact of being thrown out of several medical schools. (By the way, where the hell does he get that human brain/eyeball combo at the start?) In any case, our ‘bio-electro-technician’ gets his big break when a tragic accident befalls his fiancee, Elizabeth (Patty Mullen).

“A tossed human salad”

Jeffrey has modified the lawnmower which they’ve bought for Elizabeth’s father because of course he has, but a problem with his modifications sends it into fatal collision with Elizabeth, who is brutally dismembered. But rather than think, ‘perhaps I’m not great at this,’ Jeffrey decides he can put Elizabeth back together again using his scientific nous. In fact, if he’s going to achieve this, he decides he might as well make some minor improvements. See, Elizabeth was a little on the large side (the film’s only truly implausible special effect is that unconvincing fat suit) and although Jeffrey had made an attempt to staple her stomach (!) it hadn’t worked. Jeffrey does quite a bit of research on this, if that’s what you can call buying a lot of softcore mags and attaching photos of Elizabeth’s face over the girls’ bodies, but in the end he does what anyone would do: gathers a group of prostitutes for a ‘special party’, where he will choose the nicest bodies ready for Elizabeth v.1.1. This isn’t without precedent, by the way; Victor Frankenstein also scavenges body parts which he considers are aesthetically-pleasing, so Jeffrey Franken is in solid, literary company here. That Jeffrey reaches this conclusion after drilling holes in his own head is neither here nor there. But how will he harvest the body parts he needs?

By adulterating crack cocaine, of course. Once inhaled, it will cause the women to explode. He knows this because he practices on a guinea pig. Although he has a moment of conscience which almost prevents this from happening, gladly it does happen, in one of the most absurd, brilliantly excessive sequences ever filmed. Oh Frank Henenlotter, how we love you for it. But actually getting the parts is only the beginning. Jeffrey next has to assemble them, do the obligatory lightning reanimation thing (as much as a staple of Frankenstein movies as the monster itself) and then hope against hope that his deceased fiancee is mentally coherent and even grateful that he’s rebuilt her out of a panoply of prostitutes’ limbs, all selected because he likes them better than her own! What woman wouldn’t be charmed and flattered, I ask you?

“If they don’t wanna do it they can…just say no!”

Well, more anon. But the new Elizabeth’s first instinct is linked to her new body parts and not her brain. She follows a kind of homing instinct back to Times Square, where she regurgitates words spoken by all of the women who donated her new limbs. This soon brings her to the attention of the girls’ pimp Zorro (Henenlotter regular Joseph Gonzalez) who has been raging over their loss, and wants to find the mysterious ‘Jersey boy’ who somehow blew them up. As Jeffrey desperately tries to steer Elizabeth back home, he has to throw himself into Zorro’s path once more.

Patty Mullen – once a Penthouse Pet – is outrageously good as the modded Elizabeth, lurching and gurning her way through New York to great comedic effect. The re-use of the script in compromising situations is also great in terms of the comedy of errors aspects, and let’s face it – the purple-clad, stitched-up form of Elizabeth has become a modern horror classic image, thanks to a keen eye for a good look as well as Mullen’s fun performance, which only appears at around the hour mark in any case. Good horror monsters don’t need a lot of screen time, they just make the most of it while they’re there. We should give James Lorinz plenty of credit for his performance too, though, as he carries a great deal of the film via his (deadpan) monologue, as well as looking genuinely put upon, albeit by his own crummy decisions. The crux of the film is Jeffrey desperately trying – and failing – to control a series of increasingly bizarre situations. And it’s when Elizabeth recovers her sense of self that he’s really in trouble…

“What I did may have been a bit unorthodox…”

The denouement in this film is essentially a delicious bit of body horror payback; Jeffrey has after all devoted his efforts to an ‘oestrogen-based serum’, which can only be used to resurrect women, so when his head is sadly and brutally detached from his body, he can only be brought back with a woman’s body. Or, bodies, Calling Dr. Freud: it seems that the guy who was hellbent on choosing the sexiest body parts was happiest looking at them from more of a distance, and bemoans his new lack of his ‘johnson’ once Elizabeth has given him a taste of his own medicine. Oh, my. Well, thanks to the easily-understood blueprints and the stock of component parts, as well as a girlfriend who returns the favour, he and Elizabeth can be together again at the end of the film. In what sort of way, ours not to reason why, but there’s a moral of sorts to this tale.

For a film about a hybrid undead prostitute running amok on New York’s streets, and for all that it had an exceptionally modest box office reception, Frankenhooker seems like Henenlotter’s most accessible film of the bunch. Hear me out: regardless of the subject matter, it doesn’t feel quite as skeezy as Basket Case or Brain Damage, despite sharing a lot of shooting locations and being made within a few short years. The NY streets are still sleazy but brighter, less oppressive-feeling somehow, and besides the film veers between there and the leafy suburbia over the bridge, as well as feeling a lot more modern with its TV talk show skits and the Never Say No song, which pokes fun at a lot of late 80s social anxieties. With the exception of what I’ll refer to as the ‘fridge scene’, the body horror is less grotesque here, too; Elizabeth has a few stitches, but otherwise she certainly doesn’t look as grim or warped as Belial or Elmer. It’s also a rather bloodless film, even oddly so, thanks to the novel limb-gathering technology Jeffrey deploys – which cauterises the wounds rather well. The horror overall is overshadowed by what creeps into soft-core territory in places, perhaps giving us a peek at the kind of horror/exploitation ratio Henenlotter most prefers. All in all, Frankenhooker keeps things cartoonish, and never quite as dark as either Basket Case or Brain Damage. It’s very much its own beast with its own laugh-out-loud atmosphere and outlandish, fleshly excess, and it’s yet another enjoyable foray into a world where bodily integrity spoils the fun.

 

 

 

 

 

Blood Clots (2018)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

Anthology films – often three short tales with a common framework – are nothing new, even if the format isn’t used all that often today. We have, however, seen some interesting variations on the anthology film in recent years, perhaps most notably with The ABCs of Death in 2012, which made a minor stir and spawned a second edition. Certainly, what this anthology showed was that there’s acres of potential in the idea that a film can comprise several shorter chapters, whether or not these chapters are linked in the way that, say, the old Amicus portmanteau films were. As we know, sometimes a film’s cardinal sin is overstaying its welcome, or stretching a meagre idea over ninety minutes. Short filmmakers can’t get away with that. So, I was very optimistic when I came to watch Blood Clots, an anthology film which has taken the unusual step of compiling seven horror tales. Whilst the stories themselves aren’t linked, what they have in common is a punchy, decisively entertaining approach and enough variety to please any number of viewers.

The very first short film (or ‘Clot I’, which is perhaps a little unnecessary) is Hell of a Day, which is probably mood-wise the heaviest of all the films on offer, featuring an injured woman seeking shelter during a good old fashioned, honest-to-goodness zombie epidemic somewhere in rural Australia. In Shaun of the Dead style she breaks into an inn, but the tenants have disappeared and soon, the dead are able to follow her. Panicked, she locks herself in the cellar. This film focuses more on her plight and the effects of solitude upon her, albeit that the film is still bloody and one scene here is sure to make viewers wince and yelp (as I did). That said, the end sequence takes an odd turn, which ends the film more on a note of horror parody than full seriousness. Next up is Never Tear Us Apart, which starts with a man tied to a chair! Thankfully, this film doesn’t turn into a torture flick, as we instead follow two visitors to the self-same cabin in the woods where Chair Guy is currently situated. There’s a little twist here in a film which boasts a funny script, and a grisly riff on backwoods horror. Blue Moon, the third film, is a genuine oddity, and does something I have genuinely never seen and doubt I’ll see again: it starts off at a dogging event, and if you don’t know what that means, then definitely don’t look it up. On this particular night, which is all being filmed for the benefit of European fans of this rural pastime, an attractive young Romanian woman by the name of Nicoletta has turned up to join in. She looks decidedly uncomfortable, but – as the title might give away – it’s not long before men are fleeing through the woods in the awkward situation of having their trousers round their ankles, as Nicoletta isn’t some naive young girl after all.

Time to Eat is next, a short, sweet spin on the ‘something in the basement’ idea, followed by Still, which is a genius idea whereby a street performer – you know, the guys who stand stock still in city centres for the edification of tourists – is stuck, rooted to the spot during an incredibly gory zombie outbreak. We’re treated to his internal monologue as all of this unfolds, and this is a film both very camp and very slick in its delivery. Hellyfish has a daft central idea worthy of SyFy, as the unlikely couple of a Russian femme fatale and an Iranian jihadist look for a missing H-bomb off the coast of the US. We all know what ‘nuclear’ means where there’s any manner of ecosystem around, so before long this goofy skit on ‘B’ movies old and new winds up terrorising the beach with…well, nothing more needs to be said, I’m sure.

The final film in this collection is my pick of the bunch: The Call of Charlie achieves an awful lot in its short running time, but it’s paced beautifully, melding dinner party politics with Lovecraftian horror as if these things belong seamlessly together. When some Friday night uninvited guests disturb a dinner date which hosts Diane and Mark are laying on for their work friends, Maureen and Charlie, a lot of awkwardness ensues. This is exacerbated when unwanted guests Virginia and Jay actually clap eyes on Charlie himself. No one else seems to think it’s odd that he’s a tentacled monster, and dinnertime politics keep diverting the conversation away from what in hell he is and why exactly his date, Maureen, is quite so smitten. The big gag here is, of course, that the crashers are more of a hindrance than the guy rocking the Innsmouth look. A fantastic mask for the character of Charlie, made by the people at The Basement FX, adds gloss and gravitas to an engaging short film which keeps on layering the ridiculous and the sublime. I liked the little nod to HP Lovecraft himself in the end credits, too.

Blood Clots needs to make no apology for compiling such a whirlwind tour of horror themes and tropes; there’s something oddly comforting yet compelling about all the zombies, cannibals, lycanthropes, creepy basements and cabins in the woods we get here, like a gathering of old friends in old haunts. The twists in these tales are fairly easy to spot, but the films are none the worse for it, instead keeping it all tonally light, albeit that things get very grisly (and inventive in that grisliness). Often funny, and well-matched to the short film format, this anthology film is terrifically enjoyable. If you’ve ever seen a great short film at a festival, say, and wondered whatever becomes of them, then you’ll find this format and this release very welcome, and I for one would definitely like to see more compilations like this one available in future.

Blood Clots is available now on Vimeo and Amazon. 

 

The Basket Case sequels…

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

If you freeze-frame in the opening reels of Basket Case 2, a curious thing happens. You can almost – almost – sense the utter surprise on Frank Henenlotter’s part that he’s making a sequel to his surprise grindhouse hit at all.

At the end of Basket Case, see, it seems that both Duane and Belial are goners: that stark image of them both hanging from the Hotel Broslyn signage and their subsequent plunge to the ground showed us in no uncertain terms that this was meant to be the end of them. So it’s a surprise on many levels that in 1990, they were back – not dead after all, but merely injured. As news footage details their case, some concerned people are watching from home: this interested party knows that the only thing Duane and Belial can do now is go to ground, in a less literal sense, so it’s lucky that they’re ready and willing to help them.

It turns out that ‘Granny Ruth’ (actually jazz singer Annie Ross!) and her granddaughter Susan, living out in Staten Island, run a safe house for other people who are ‘differently bodied’. In fact, the whole house is dedicated to the differently-bodied, resembling a cross between Nightbreed’s Midian and cult kids’ TV show Trapdoor. Let’s just say that the house’s inmates are an interesting looking bunch, and benign enough (amongst themselves at least). This could be Duane and Belial’s big opportunity. Thing is, the press know that Duane and Belial are probably still alive, and they want to track them down; Duane, too doesn’t have to go far along this road before he starts to crave his freedom and a normal life. Things are not going to run smoothly, clearly, so will Duane have to choose his brother, or a new life without him?

Made in the same year as the uproarious Frankenhooker, Basket Case 2 feels like a perfect blend between opportunism and kicking back – grabbing the chance to make a sequel while the going’s good, but not labouring under any illusions either. Henenlotter is clearly in a mind to go to town on the special effects here, with the result that the film feels to be around 60% latex, and there’s a whole host of new characters being given screen time. Eerily, Belial looks a hell of a lot more like Kevin Van Hentenryck in this incarnation, which somehow makes him look even nastier, even though Van Hentenryck himself has a perfectly amiable face: that lends itself very well to the whole good twin/bad twin thing. In terms of subject matter, things feel a lot more jokey overall in Basket Case 2, but there are still characteristically grim moments. This isn’t a simple moral high ground thing where the poor put-upon ‘freaks’ are mistreated; they aren’t terribly nice to outsiders either, maintaining what seems to be an unspoken Henenlotter mantra: “most people are assholes”, whether or not they have the conventional two arms, two legs, one head.

“Ripping the faces off people may not be in your best interest.”

By far the best addition to the case in Basket Case 2 is Granny Ruth, however: a strident maternal figure, she combines patient good humour with her charges with a kind of vigilante zeal, doing anything within her power to protect them. All of this looks oddly quaint, coming from someone in smart suits and court shoes. Similarly, granddaughter Susan (Heather Rattray) is the quintessential girl-next-door type, though it transpires – in one of Duane’s many failed romantic encounters – that she has a bizarre characteristic all of her own. You wind up with an odd, homely sort of horror here, shot through with comedy elements and the odd splash of horrific practical-effects heavy gore.

Basket Case 2 happily pushes an already ridiculous premise to its zenith (or so you’d think) by riffing on the same ideas which proved successful in the first film, adding more and more monstrous bodies and behaviours. The hideous sex scenes at the end could even demonstrate some shared lineage with Bad Biology (as could the mutant offspring) but for our purposes here, what they certainly show is that, whatever else he is, Belial is actually more successful with the opposite sex than his brother! Duane decides normality is overrated – possibly, probably as a result of the relationships which have come their way – and he tries to put things back as they were in a spectacularly grisly fashion. This sets things up for the only real place they could go with the next and final Basket Case outing…

“No one is exactly sure what will come out of her…”

Basket Case 3: The Progeny was made the following year, and wrapped within a month. Being made so close to the last film, it hardly needs the lengthy flashback which harks back to BC2, but what this does make clear is that the memorable sex scene sequence isn’t forgotten yet; it’s going somewhere. We find out that Eve (Belial’s girlfriend) is in the family way, no one’s quite sure what her birth will entail, and Duane has meanwhile been locked in a padded cell for trying to re-attach his brother. These are, by the way, not words you’d ordinarily find yourself typing.

Due to the potentially difficult birth ahead, Granny Ruth and her merry gang are heading off to Georgia to see ‘Uncle Hal’, actually Granny Ruth’s ex-husband: they trust him with this potentially difficult case, so with Duane in tow, they all take a roadtrip – in a converted school bus adapted for such an occasion. Duane, not put off by his amnesia, instability or suspicious lack of a psychic connection with his brother, and certainly not deterred by his utter inability to form workable relationships with women, is more or less instantly prepared to jeopardise the group’s safety by blabbing to a pretty girl he meets along the way…

Duane and his brother’s relationship is pretty fraught, and the big gag here is that all of the freaks seem more level than Duane by this stage: there’s lots here on Duane’s state of mind, even if handled as jokily as everything else in this film. Kevin Van Hentenryck gives his all as ever, and seems to be having fun playing for laughs, even getting close to pratfalling in places. As for Granny Ruth, she ramps up the whole motherly guise even more here, fussing over the new arrivals, transporting her brood in a school bus and even organising a singalong.

Each successive Basket Case film seems to reach a little higher, from an already lunatic premise, to new heights of creature FX and bizarre ways for these FX to get invoked. For instance, the birth sequence in BC3 is a fun exercise in excess, throwing in catchphrases like “ovarian ovation”, then matching this with a dream sequence for Belial (reprised after the end credits). The last visit to the world of Belial and Duane shows them not as outsiders, railing against the world, but somewhat bewildered members of an extended family group, dealing with family issues. In this respect, BC3 couldn’t be more different to BC; the fact that all of the planned gore was more or less excised from BC3 at the request of the producers further alters the film’s tone, making it generally more playful and allowing it to give the odd nod to other films (the ‘mad inventor’ shtick had just done a turn in Frankenhooker; Belial’s contraption also looks a little like a certain scene in Aliens, though perhaps that’s just me, going a little mad here?)

Anyway, I for one cannot imagine a jazz number working in BC, whereas it seems to fit in quite neatly in BC3, with an earworm tune played by a proper jazz outfit. Well, moving from a skeezy, grimy exploitation horror, one which Frank Henenlotter didn’t worry too much about because he didn’t expect anyone to actually see it, to a film with a musical number is, I think, a way of showing how much variation eventually crept in to this most unlikely trilogy. The Basket Case films are a variable bunch, true, but they’re each in their way creative and entertaining whilst never creeping too far from the rather grotty characters and ideas which got things started.

 

 

 

Mara (2018)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

When I heard that Mara was a horror story invoking sleep paralysis as a key element of its plot, as a sufferer I was immediately interested. Sleep paralysis is well understood in the modern age, just as sleep and dreams are generally, but anyone who has ever had a significant nightmare, or a waking nightmare will know that reason and rationality are furthest from your mind when undergoing this kind of terror; therefore, these experiences remain ripe for solid on-screen explorations, offering lots of potential. Happily, director Clive Tonge and writer Jonathan Frank have shown themselves more than up to that task in Mara, a film which weaves a mythology around sleep paralysis, but balances this against far more grounded and mundane preoccupations which trouble people in their sleep.

The film begins with a child, Sophie Wynsfield, who is woken one night by strange sounds. She investigates, looking for her mother, but when she finds her she also finds her father, lying dead, frozen in terror in his bed. Mother Helena is soon charged with his murder as the only possible suspect who had access to him that evening. Images of the ‘night hag’ which then appear during the opening credits help to forge the link between what we now acknowledge as night terrors with something more purposeful and malign. Many cultures around the world have personified this kind of nightmare as a hag, spirit or demon, in keeping with a common symptom of the experience, the sensation of something (or therefore someone) pressing down on you and restricting your breathing. With this as context, we meet our main character, Dr. Kate Fuller (Olga Kurylenko), a rookie psychologist called in by the police to help deal with this complex case. She tries to win the terrified Sophie’s trust, and for the first time, as psychologist and child speak about the events of the night before, Sophie mentions a name – ‘Mara’.

When Helena is later interviewed, she also invokes the name Mara, referring to it as a ‘sleep demon’ and the real murderer of her husband. Perhaps it’s her immersion in the case, but Kate, too, now begins to experience unsettling waking dreams as she begins to piece together whatever she can about this strange case. Using the scrawled notes she found at the scene, she investigates further, coming into contact with more and more people who believe that their sleep is being disturbed by this sleep demon. In particular, an attendee of a support group by the name of Dougie suggests that he knows how Mara operates, and can predict what she will do next – and to whom. Naturally law enforcement aren’t much taken by this kind of supernatural explanation for deaths like Matthew Wynsfield’s, and Dougie’s involvement with a now growing list of premature deaths puts him in the frame. To clear his name, he has to reveal to Kate what he knows. By this stage, Kate is herself embroiled in something she cannot understand, or escape.

From the outset, Dr. Fuller seems to have a strange, borderline unprofessional level of interest in the Wynsfield case, throwing out promises to Sophie which she must know she cannot keep. This suggests trauma lurking in her own background, even from the very beginning of the film. Kurylenko, in a decidedly unglamorous and challenging role, plays her part with a suitable blend of self-contained gravitas and moments of barely-repressed emotion. The film as a whole depends very much on her, her responses and impressions; as her own back story comes to the fore, her focus on the case makes additional sense; she also attracts more sympathy, as hers is a troubled lot. The sleep paralysis scenes themselves are also very effective. Sheer helplessness is communicated simply but plausibly, and the escalating horror is successful because the director understands that the supernatural belongs on the periphery; some of the most unsettling scenes are barely there at all, but they make your skin crawl nonetheless.

Something else which is very interesting in this film comes via another of its core plot developments – that Matthew Wynsfield somehow puts himself in danger by seeking help for his sleep paralysis issues. Rather than that vague modern panacea of ‘support’ ridding people of their problems, here in the form of a support group, in Mara it exposes people to more harm. In effect, a potential cure, one we believe in on an almost religious scale today, lays people bare to a threat, which itself stems from an innovative blend of folklore, the supernatural, and something between a good old-fashioned curse and psychological breakdown. It’s pessimistic in the extreme, and it’s handled with genuine ingenuity here.

Whilst sleep has been used as the basis for horror many times in horror cinema – something which the film acknowledges and openly alludes to by namechecking Freddy Krueger at one point – Mara is an altogether different animal. This is a very, very slow-burn movie, taking its time and allowing the sensation of inescapable, ratcheting tension to pervade. A range of effective performances underpin this throughout, with special mention to horror monster diehard Javier Botet and Kurylenko has just the right degree of vulnerability set against strength, a modern woman struggling to recast events in safe, predictable scientific language. Carefully paced and moving deliberately throughout, it captures sleep paralysis well, weaving elements of mythology around it and keeping us guessing. Supernatural horror, shorn of the endless jump scares, is so much more worthy of time and attention, as Mara shows in abundance. It’s clever, brooding and hideously effective.

Mara (2018) will be released in US cinemas on September 7th 2018.